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Is Jimmy Kimmel returning to ABC next year? Disney president and chief creative officer Dana Walden says she’s working on it.
“It’s a very challenging daypart, late-night,” Walden said during her Thursday morning conversation
at Bloomberg’s Screentime. “That’s not to say that Jimmy is not doing a phenomenal job, and his ratings are up, but they’re up relative to a smaller audience that’s watching late night on broadcast television.”
She continued, “Obviously, there’s a YouTube channel. Millions of people are watching, on demand, parts of that show. That is not a lucrative opportunity for a very premium talk show, so we’re trying to make sense of the business while also honoring a deep partnership. I love Jimmy. We have a great friendship. He’s close to a number of the people at Disney, and again, we’re trying to work through it and make sense of both. What does Jimmy want? What’s the right thing to do, and what’s the right thing for our business?”
Page Six reported in September that Kimmel would step back from late-night after his contract expires in May 2027, marking 24 years on the air. ABC, Kimmel’s home network, denied the claims, telling multiple outlets that news of the host’s departure is “inaccurate” and “any reports about the future of the show at this point are purely speculative.”
Kimmel and his show have become symbols of free speech and resistance during President Donald Trump’s unprecedented term-two media crackdown. It all started about a year ago when ABC pulled “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air “indefinitely” after one of the biggest TV station owners in the U.S., Nexstar Media, said it would pre-empt airings of the talk show due to on-air jokes Kimmel made about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Around the same time, FCC chair Brendan Carr threatened to take action against ABC over Kimmel’s remarks. He said during an appearance on Benny Johnson’s podcast, “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
More recently, in April, the FCC ordered ABC to submit its license renewal applications early. The move came just days after Trump called for Kimmel to be fired for a joke about First Lady Melania Trump. Then, in early September, Kimmel revealed during an opening monologue that “Live!” was moving an interview with Texas state Rep. James Talarico to YouTube, fearing retaliation from Carr’s FCC.
Elsewhere in the interview, Walden addressed the poor box office performance of the live-action “Moana,” which hit theaters in July. She blamed the outcome on the film’s closeness to the animated
“Moana 2,” which came out in November 2024.
“It’s so competitive right now that you have to have … the right film at the right time, with audiences feeling a certain degree of demand. I would say our live-action ‘Moana,’ which is excellent, I think it was hurt by the proximity to our second animated version of ‘Moana,’ which came together under unusual circumstances, but premiered about 18 months before this one. So perhaps there was not enough time to create a lot of pent-up demand for another film.”
The original 2016 “Moana” was a hit $643 million worldwide. But “Moana 2,” which was cobbled together using a scrapped “Moana” TV show, blew expectations out of the water, reaching just over $1 billion by the end of its run. The live-action “Moana” didn’t continue the upward trajectory, despite high expectations. It only managed $323 million worldwide against a staggering production budget of $250 million.
But for a company like Disney, big IP like “Moana” creates value through channels other than box office revenues, such as theme park attractions, consumer products and streaming. To this point, Walden added, “Our job is to deliver the highest quality. Try to create content which endures and is going to be of value years and years and years from now. That is what has built this unmatched canon of IP. So there will be an event. There will be something.”
Walden also addressedthe recent Disney layoffs, which affected a few hundred employees across multiple departments. The cuts marked the third round of the year under Disney’s newly appointed CEO Josh D’Amaro.
“I think, like all of our similarly situated competitors, and certainly all of our competitors in the tech industry, there is a need to constantly evaluate how you’re structured. You know what? How big is the organization?” Walden said. She later added, “This past round was a voluntary retirement program, which was extremely generous and gave a number of our long-tenured executives agency and the opportunity to make their own decisions around whether the timing was right to leave or to stay, knowing that this evolution will never stop, technology set their sights on our business, and we must survive and thrive and grow, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
